Bitcoin Backlash: Back to the Drawing Board?

My last post on Bitcoin got me some push back and I am glad that it did. I would rather be read, and disagreed with, than not read at all. I have been told that I know very little about crypto currencies and that I have much to learn, and I agree. The crux of the disagreements though lay in my classifying Bitcoin as a currency, not as an asset or as a commodity. Since this classification is central to how you should think about investing versus trading, and value versus price, and goes well beyond Bitcoin, I decided to dig deeper into the classification and provide even more ammunition for those who disagree with me to tell me how wrong I am.

Classifying Investment: The What and the Why

We are products of our own world views, and mine, for better or worse, are built around my interest in valuation. It is that perspective that led me to classifying investments into cash flow generating assets, commodities, currencies and collectibles. To value an investment, I need that investment to generate future cashflows (at least on an expected basis) and that was my basis for separating cash flow generating assets (which range the spectrum from a bond to a stock to a business) from the rest.

The pushback that I got did not surprised me, partly because my definition may be at odds with the definitions used by other entities. Accountants, for instance, classify items as assets that I think are pure fiction, such as goodwill. There are others who argue that any investment on which you can make money is an asset, broadening it to include just about everything from baseball cards to government bonds. In fact, crypto currencies have been at the center of many of these disagreements, with the SEC recently deciding to treat ICOs as securities (and thus assets) and the Korean central bank categorizing Bitcoin as a commodity. Since the judgment made by these entities have regulatory and tax consequences, I am sure that they will be debated, discussed and disagreed with.  

Why Bitcoin is a currency and not an asset..

One reason that people are uncomfortable drawing the line between currency, commodity and asset is that the line can sometimes shift quickly. Take the US dollar, for instance. Its primary purpose is to serve as a medium of exchange and as a store of value, and it is thus a currency. However, you can lend US dollars to a business or individual and generate interest income. That is true, but it is not the currency that is then the asset, but the loan that you make with it, or the bond that is denominated in it. Building further, if I create a bank that takes in deposits in dollars (and pays an interest rate on them) and lends out those dollars as loans, I have a business and that business is an asset. I can value the loan and the bond based upon the interest rate you earn and the default risk that you face, or the bank, based upon the interest rate spread it earns and the risk of default that it faces on its collective portfolio, but I cannot value the US dollar.

Can I construct investments denominated in Bitcoin or another crypto currency that earn me interest or a return? Of course, but I can do that in any currency, and it is in fact one of the functions of a currency. That does not make Bitcoin an asset! You can already see that the question of whether Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) are currencies or assets becomes trickier, because an ICO can be constructed to give you a share of the ownership in a business (and the cash flows from that business), making it more of an asset than a currency (thus giving credence to the SEC's view that it is a security). The lack of standardization in ICO structures, though, makes it difficult to generalize, since loosely put, an ICO can be constructed to be anything from a donation (at least, according to Kathleen Breitman at Tezos) to quasi common stock (without the voting rights).

A few of you have pointed to the networking benefits that might create value for Bitcoin, but I am afraid that I don't see that as a basis for assigning value to it. A network can become an asset, but only when you can make money off the network. The value of Facebook to me, as an investor, is not that I am part of the Facebook network (I am not, since I have not posted on Facebook in almost three years) but that I get a share of the money made from selling advertising to those on the network. Unless you can trace monetary benefits to being part of the Bitcoin network, there is no value to being part of the network. (Visa and MasterCard are assets, not because they have wide networks and are accepted globally, but because every time they are used, they make 1-2% of the transaction value.) To the argument that Bitcoin miners can make money as the network expands, that value is for providing a service, not for holding Bitcoin.

Why Bitcoin is more currency than commodity

The essence of a currency is that its primary uses are as a medium of exchange or as a store of value. The key to a commodity is that it is an input into a process that has a utilitarian function. Oil and coal are clearly commodities, since they derive their value from the fact that they can be used to produce energy. It is true, as with currencies, that you can create an asset based upon a commodity. A share of an oil well is an asset not because you like or even need oil, it is because you hope to sell the oil to generate cash flows. It is also true that gold is a commodity, but as I noted in the prior post, I think it is more currency than commodity, because the quantity of gold that we have on the face of the earth vastly exceeds whatever utilitarian needs it might serve. It is shiny, durable, makes beautiful jewelry and has some industrial uses, but if that is all we valued gold for, it would be worth a lot less than it is trading for, and there would be less of it around. 

The question with Bitcoin then becomes whether it can become (or perhaps already is) like gold. Here is my test: If tomorrow, humanity collectively decided to abandon its attachment to gold as a value store, would its price go to zero? I don't think so, because it does have uses and while its price will drop, it will be priced based on those uses. Applying the same test to Bitcoin, I am left nonplussed about what value to attach to a digital currency if at the end, no one uses it in transactions, it has no aesthetic value and it produces nothing utilitarian.

A Commodity Argument for Crypto Currencies (but perhaps not for Bitcoin)

Some of you have pointed to Bitcoin's scarcity (created by the hard cap on production) and the fact that time and energy are spent on its production. Scarcity is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary condition for something to be a commodity. Sand is a scarce resource but it is not a commodity because I cannot think of a good use for it; so is bull manure, but that is a discussion for another time and day. The fact that time and energy went into the production of Bitcoin cannot be used to justify paying for it unless you can show that it is necessary for something that does create utility or value.   If, as argued by someone who commented on my last post, Bitcoin is a synthetic commodity, I can see that it is synthetic but what conceivable use does it have that makes it a commodity? Therein lies an opening for a “crypto currency as commodity” defense, though it works better for crypto currencies like Ethereum than it does for Bitcoin, and it require three building blocks: 

1. Block Chains and Smart Contracts will create large disruptions in businesses: You have to believe that block chains and the smart contracts that emerge from them will replace conventional contracts in many businesses, and that will generate cash flows to the contract providers. Your argument can be based upon either economic (that the transactions costs willl be lower) or security (that the contracts will be more secure) rationales.
2. Crypto Currencies are the lubricants for smart contracting: The discussion of block chains and crypto currency have become entangled into one discussion, but it is worth remembering that block chains predate crypto currencies and can work with fiat currencies. Thus, you will have to argue that crypto currencies are a necessary ingredient to make smart contracts work efficiently, and that the demand for them will then rise as smart contracting expands. 
3. “Your” crypto currency will be one of the winners: Even if you can make the first two legs of this argument, it remains an argument for growth in digital or crypto currencies, not an argument for a specific one. To seal the deal, you will have to explain why your crypto currency of choice (Bitcoin, Ethereum etc.) will become the winner or at least one of the winners in the smart contracting currency race, perhaps because it has the “best technology” for smart contracting or has the most buy in by the institutional players in the game.

I think that the first leg of this argument will be easy to make, the second leg a little more difficult and the third leg will need the most convincing. Even if you can show, based upon today's technology, that you have the "best" smart contracting currency, how do you build barriers to entry that prevent you being pre-empted by another innovation or technology down the road? 

Conclusion

The game is still early, and there is much that we do not know about crypto currencies. I remain willing to learn both from people who know more than I do (and there are many out there) as well as events on the ground. As you listen to arguments for or against crypto currencies, my only advice is that you go back to basics about the needs that they are filling and that you ask questions about their long term staying power. I think it is also time for us to separate arguments about block chains/smart contracts from arguments about crypto currencies, since you can have one without the other, and to differentiate between crypto currencies, rather than defend them or abandon them all, as a bundle. To me, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and  ICOs are different enough from each other, not only in structure but also in terms of end game, that they need to be assessed independently.

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Past Blog Posts on Crypto Currencies

1. Bitcoin Q&A: Bubble or Breakthrough?
2. Crypto Currencies: Future of Money or Speculative Hype
3. The Bitcoin Boom: Asset, Currency, Commodity or Collectible

The Bitcoin Boom: Asset, Currency, Commodity or Collectible?

As I have noted with my earlier posts on crypto currencies, in general, and bitcoin, in particular, I find myself disagreeing with both its most virulent critics and its strongest proponents.  Unlike Jamie Dimon, I don't believe that bitcoin is a fraud and that people who are "stupid enough to buy it" will pay a price for that stupidity. Unlike its biggest cheerleaders, I don't believe that crypto currencies are now or ever will be an asset class or that these currencies can change fundamental truths about risk, investing and management. The reason for the divide, though, is that the two sides seem to disagree fundamentally on what bitcoin is, and at  the risk of raising hackles all the way around, I will argue that bitcoin is not an asset, but a currency, and as such, you cannot value it or invest in it. You can only price it and trade it.

Assets, Commodities, Currencies and Collectibles
Not everything can be valued, but almost everything can be priced. To understand the distinction between value and price, let me start by positing that every investment that I will look at has to fall into one of the following four groupings:

1. Cash Generating Asset: An asset generates or is expected to generate cash flows in the future. A business that you own is definitely an asset, as is a claim on the cash flows on that business. Those claims can be either contractually set (bonds or debt), residual (equity or stock) or even contingent (options). What assets share in common is that these cash flows can be valued, and assets with high cash flows and less risk should be valued more than assets with lower cash flows and more risk. At the same time, assets can also be priced, relative to each other, by scaling the price that you pay to a common metric. With stocks, this takes the form of comparing pricing multiples (PE ratio, EV/EBITDA, Price to Book or Value/Sales) across similar companies to form pricing judgments of which stocks are cheap and which ones are expensive.
2. Commodity: A commodity derives its value from its use as raw material to meet a fundamental need, whether it be energy, food or shelter. While that value can be estimated by looking at the demand for and supply of the commodity, there are long lag and lead times in both that make that valuation process much more difficult than for an asset. Consequently, commodities tend to be priced, often relative to their own history, with normalized oil, coal wheat or iron ore prices being computed by averaging prices across long cycles.
3. Currency: A currency is a medium of exchange that you use to denominate cash flows and is a store of purchasing power, if you choose to not invest. Standing alone, currencies have no cash flows and  cannot be valued, but they can be priced against other currencies. In the long term, currencies that are accepted more widely as a medium of exchange and that hold their purchasing power better over time should see their prices rise, relative to currencies that don't have those characteristics. In the short term, though, other forces including governments trying to manipulate exchange rates can dominate. Using a more conventional currency example, you can see this in a graph of the US $ against seven fiat currencies, where over the long term (1995-2017), you can see the Swiss Franc and the Chinese Yuan increasing in price, relative to the $, and the Mexican Peso, Brazilian Real, Indian Rupee and British Pound, dropping in price, again relative to the $.
   
4. Collectible: A collectible has no cash flows and is not a medium of exchange but it can sometimes have aesthetic value (as is the case with a master painting or a sculpture) or an emotional attachment (a baseball card or team jersey). A collectible cannot be valued since it too generates no cash flows but it can be priced, based upon how other people perceive its desirability and the scarcity of the collectible.  

Viewed through this prism, Gold is clearly not a cash flow generating asset, but is it a commodity? Since gold's value has little to do with its utilitarian functions and more to do with its longstanding function as a store of value, especially during crises or when you lose faith in paper currencies, it is more currency than commodity. Real estate is an asset, even if it takes the form of a personal home, because you would have had to pay rental expenses (a cash flow), in its absence. Private equity and hedge funds are forms of investing in assets, currencies, commodities or collectibles, and are not separate asset classes. 

Investing versus Trading

The key is that cash generating assets can be both valued and priced, commodities can be priced much more easily than valued, and currencies and collectibles can only be priced. So what? I have written before about the divide between investing and trading and it is worth revisiting that contrast. To invest in something, you need to assess its value, compare to the price, and then act on that comparison, buying if the price is less than value and selling if it is greater. Trading is a much simpler exercise, where you price something, make a judgment on whether that price will go up or down in the next time period and then make a pricing bet. While you can be successful at either, the skill sets and tool kits that you use are different for investing and trading, and what makes for a good investor is different from the ingredients needed for good trading. The table below captures the difference between trading (the pricing game) and investing (the value game).

	The Pricing Game	The Value Game
Underlying philosophy	The price is the only real number that you can act on. No one knows what the value of an asset is and estimating it is of little use.	Every asset has a fair or true value. You can estimate that value, albeit with error, and price has to converge on value (eventually).
To play the game	You try to guess which direction the price will move in the next period(s) and trade ahead of the movement. To win the game, you have to be right more often than wrong about direction and to exit before the winds shift.	You try to estimate the value of an asset, and if it is under(over) value, you buy (sell) the asset. To win the game, you have to be right about value (for the most part) and the market price has to move to that value
Key drivers	Price is determined by demand & supply, which in turn are affected by mood and momentum.	Value is determined by cash flows, growth and risk.
Information effect	Incremental information (news, stories, rumors) that shifts the mood will move the price, even if it has no real consequences for long term value.	Only information that alter cash flows, growth and risk in a material way can affect value.
Tools of the game	(1) Technical indicators, (2) Price Charts (3) Investor Psychology	(1) Ratio analysis, (2) DCF Valuation (3) Accounting Research
Time horizon	Can be very short term (minutes) to mildly short term (weeks, months).	Long term
Key skill	Be able to gauge market mood/momentum shifts earlier than the rest of the market.	Be able to “value” assets, given uncertainty.
Key personality traits	(1) Market amnesia (2) Quick Acting (3) Gambling Instincts	(1) Faith in “value” (2) Faith in markets (3) Patience (4) Immunity from peer pressure
Biggest Danger(s)	Momentum shifts can occur quickly, wiping out months of profits in a few hours.	The price may not converge on value, even if your value is “right”.
Added bonus	Capacity to move prices (with lots of money and lots of followers).	Can provide the catalyst that can move price to value.
Most Delusional Player	A trader who thinks he is trading based on value.	A value investor who thinks he can reason with markets.

As I see it, you can play either the value or pricing game well, but being delusional about the game you are playing, and using the wrong tools or bringing the wrong skill set to that game, is a recipe for disaster.

What is Bitcoin?

The first step towards a serious debate on bitcoin then has to be deciding whether it is an asset, a currency, a commodity or collectible. Bitcoin is not an asset, since it does not generate cash flows standing alone for those who hold it (until you sell it).  It is not a commodity, because it is not raw material that can be used in the production of something useful. The only exception that I can think off is that if it becomes a necessary component of smart contracts, it could take on the role of a commodity; that may be ethereum's saving grace, since it has been marketed less as a currency and more as a smart contracting lubricant.  The choice then becomes whether it is a currency or a collectible, with its supporters tilting towards the former and its detractors the latter. I argued in my last post that Bitcoin is a currency, but it is not a good one yet, insofar as it has only limited acceptance as a medium of exchange and it is too volatile to be a store of value. Looking forward, there are three possible paths that I see for Bitcoin as a currency, from best case to worst case.

1. The Global Digital Currency: In the best case scenario, Bitcoin gains wide acceptance in transactions across the world, becoming a widely used global digital currency. For this to happen, it has to become more stable (relative to other currencies), central banks and governments around the world have to accept its use (or at least not actively try to impede it) and the aura of mystery around it has to fade. If that happens, it could compete with fiat currencies and given the algorithm set limits on its creation, its high price could be justified.
2. Gold for Millennials: In this scenario, Bitcoin becomes a haven for those who do not trust central banks, governments and fiat currencies. In short, it takes on the role that gold has, historically, for those who have lost trust in or fear centralized authority. It is interesting that the language of Bitcoin is filled with mining terminology, since it suggests that intentionally or otherwise, the creators of Bitcoin shared this vision. In fact, the hard cap on Bitcoin of 21 million is more compatible with this scenario than the first one. If this scenario unfolds, and Bitcoin shows the same staying power as gold, it will behave like gold does, rising during crises and dropping in more sanguine time periods.  
3. The 21st Century Tulip Bulb: In this, the worst case scenario, Bitcoin is like a shooting star, attracting more money as it soars, from those who see it as a source of easy profits, but just as quickly flares out as these traders move on to something new and different (which could be a different and better designed digital currency), leaving Bitcoin holders with memories of what might have been. If this happens, Bitcoin could very well become the equivalent of Tulip Bulbs, a speculative asset that saw its prices soar in the sixteen hundreds in Holland, before collapsing in the aftermath.

I would be lying if I said that I knew which of these scenarios will unfold, but they are all still plausible scenarios. If you are trading in Bitcoin, you may very well not care, since your time horizon may be in minutes and hours, not weeks, months or years. If you have a longer term interest in Bitcoin, though, your focus should be less on the noise of day-to-day price movements and more on advancements on its use as a currency. Note also that you could be a pessimist on Bitcoin and other crypto currencies but be an optimist about the underlying technology, especially block chain, and its potential for disruption.

Reality Checks

Combining the section where I classified investments into assets, commodities, currencies and collectibles with the one where I argued that Bitcoin is a "young" currency allows me to draw the following conclusions:

1. Bitcoin is not an asset class: To those who are carving out a portion of their portfolios for Bitcoin, be clear about why you are doing it. It is not because you want to a diversified portfolio and hold all asset classes, it is because you want to use your trading skills on Bitcoin to supercharge your portfolio returns. Lest you view this as a swipe at cryptocurrencies, I would hasten to add that fiat currencies (like the US dollar, Euro or Yen) are not asset classes either.
2. You cannot value Bitcoin, you can only price it: This follows from the acceptance that Bitcoin is a currency, not an asset or a commodity. Any one who claims to value Bitcoin either has a very different definition of value than I do or is just making up stuff as he or she goes along.
3. It will be judged as a currency: In the long term, the price that you attach to Bitcoin will depend on how well it will performs as a currency. If it is accepted widely as a medium of exchange and is stable enough to be a store of value, it should command a high price. If it becomes gold-like, a fringe currency that investors flee to during crises, its price will be lower. Worse, if it is a transient currency that loses all purchasing power, as it is replaced by something new and different, it will crash and burn.
4. You don't invest in Bitcoin, you trade it: Since you cannot value Bitcoin, you don't have a critical ingredient that you need to be an investor. You can trade Bitcoin and become wealthy doing so, but it is because you are a good trader.
5. Good trader ingredients: To be a successful trader in Bitcoin, you need to recognize that moves in its price will have little do with fundamentals, everything to do with mood and momentum and big price shifts can happen on incremental information.

Would I buy Bitcoin at $6,100? No, but not for the reasons that you think. It is not because I believe that it is over valued, since I cannot make that judgment without valuing it and as I noted before, it cannot be valued. It is because I am not and never have been a good trader and, as a consequence, my pricing judgments are suspect. If you have good trading instincts, you should play the pricing game, as long as you recognize that it is a game, where you can win millions or lose millions, based upon your calls on momentum. If you win millions, I wish you the best! If you lose millions, please don't let paranoia lead you to blame the establishment, banks and governments for why you lost. Come easy, go easy!

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Past Blog Posts on Crypto Currencies

1. Bitcoin Q&A: Bubble or Breakthrough?
2. Crypto Currencies: Future of Money or Speculative Hype

Deconstructing Amazon Prime: Loss Leader or Value Creator?

Update (October 17, 2017): One of the things that I enjoy most about posting my valuations online is the feedback and how much I can use that feedback loop to improve my valuation. There are three changes that I have made to my Amazon valuation, though the end number that I get is not that different. First, as many Prime members outside the US have pointed out, the cost of Amazon Prime is less than $99/year in many countries, ranging from $22/year in Italy to just over $50/year in Germany to only $8/year in India. That lower annual cost will bring down the value of a member (existing and new). To allow for that, I have replaced the $99 annual fee that I had used in my valuation with $93.78, a  weighted average of the fees, allowing for the one quarter of Prime customers in the US who have monthly subscriptions (and pay more) and the 20% of customers outside the US (my estimate), who pay, on average, about $50/year.  Second, as some of you have noted, my operating margin was computed prior to just shipping costs and that I am double counting the customer service and media costs, which should also be added back. That increases my operating margin to 12.11% from 9.19% and I will assume that it improves to 13% over time. Third, and this was entirely my mistake, my value per existing member did not factor in the drop out rate and that has been fixed. 

I am an Amazon Prime member and have been one for a long time, and I am completely hooked. Not only do I (and my family) use Amazon Prime for items ranging from tissue paper to big screen televisions, but it has become my go-to for every possession that I need in my working and personal life. In fact, I know (and am completely at peace with the fact) that it has subtly affected my buying, as I substitute slightly more expensive Prime items for non-Prime equivalents, even when I shop on Amazon. It is not just the absence of shipping costs that draws me to Prime, but the reliability of delivery and the ease of return. In short, it makes shopping painless. As I tally how much we save each year because of Prime and weigh it against the $99 that we pay for it, I am convinced that we are getting far more value from it than what we pay, and that leads to an interesting follow up. If many of the 85 million other Prime members in October 2017 are getting the same bargain that we are, is this not an indication that Amazon has not just under priced Prime, but is perhaps selling it below cost? As someone who has wrestled with valuing Amazon over the last 20 years, I have learned never to under estimate the company. In this post, I would like to take the process I used to value a user at Uber and apply it to value not just a Prime member to Amazon but the collective value of Amazon Prime to the company.

The Growth of Amazon Prime

Amazon introduced Prime in 2005 and the service was slow to take off. At the end of 2011, only about 4% of Amazon customers were Prime members. In the years since, though, the service has seen explosive growth:

In fact, the jump in members in the last three years is particularly impressive, given how much bigger the base has become. In 2016, the company added almost 20 million new members and is on pace to add a similar number this year. In October 2017, the company’s mammoth Prime user base meant that almost 60% of all US households had memberships, suggesting that a non-Prime member is more the exception than the rule for Amazon’s US operations. Growth has been slower outside the US, slowed both by competitive/regulatory pressures and logistical challenges.

The Economics of Amazon Prime

To understand how Amazon Prime works, let’s break down the mechanics. Any one (in the countries where Prime is offered) can become a Prime member, either on a monthly or an annual basis. In the US, in 2017, the annual fee for membership was $99, as it has been for the last few years, and the monthly fee was $10.99. With 85 million members, that translates into a total revenue for the company of over $8.5 billion; the monthly members pay more but there is a portion of the membership (including students) who get discounted memberships. The other benefit for Amazon, though, comes from the fact that Amazon Prime members spend more on Amazon than non-Prime members. While the exact numbers are known only to Amazon, the most recently leaked reports suggest that the typical Prime member spends approximately $1,300/year on Amazon products, as opposed to the $700 spent by a non-Prime member. While it seems obvious, then, that Prime membership leads to more spending ($600, if you believe these two numbers), the statisticians will raise red flags about sampling bias since the true incremental revenue is unobservable; it is the difference between what the existing Prime members are spending ($1300/year) and what those same members would have spent, if they did not have Prime memberships. That is a reasonable point, but there is clearly a Prime impact, where Prime members choose Prime items over less expensive non-Prime offerings on Amazon, just as I do.

The biggest cost, by far, to Amazon is the shipping cost that the company now bears on Prime items. In 2016, the company reported net shipping subsidy costs of $7.2 billion (in the footnotes to the 10K) and assuming that almost all of these costs were related to servicing the 60 million members that Amazon had in 2016 leads to a per-member shipping cost of close to $120/ member. The other free services that Amazon offers its Prime members also create costs, though those costs are embedded in larger company-wide items and are more difficult to separate out. 

• The company expends administrative costs in providing additional customer service to its Prime members. These costs are part of the total G&A cost of $2,432 million that the company reported in 2016, but we will assume that the servicing cost per member was $10 (or $600 million in the aggregate in 2016).
• The company also buys some content for its media and Kindle reading sections specifically to back up its Prime membership. Again, that cost is part of the $16,085 million that the company as its technology and content cost in 2016 and we will assume that 10% of those costs (approximately $1.6 billion) can be attributed to Amazon Prime.

There is one final component of cost that we would like to know, but have to guess at and that is the cost to Amazon of acquiring a new member. That promotional/marketing cost is part of the total marketing cost of $7,233 million that Amazon reported in 2016 and we will assume that this cost is $100/member; in 2016, this would have translated into a total cost of $2 billion to acquire 20 million new members, leaving the remaining $5.2 billion in marketing costs as conventional advertising/marketing cost.  Pulling all these numbers, real and imagined, into a picture, here is what we get as the economics of an Amazon Prime member.

The closing statistic that is worth emphasizing here is that once someone becomes an Amazon Prime member, they tend to stay as members with an annual renewal rate of 96%.

The Value of an Existing Prime Member

Using the numbers from the previous section as a starting point, we are on our way to valuing an existing Prime member. To get to that value, we have to make some estimates for the future that reflect how the base numbers will evolve over time:

1. Renewal Rate: We will assume that annual renewal rates will stay high, at 96%, since the subscription model and the dependence on free shipping makes dropping the service difficult to do. 
2. Incremental Revenue/ Member Growth: As Amazon looks for new products and services to sell its Prime members, we will assume that the company’s legendary marketing skills will work and that the incremental revenue (which we estimated to be $600 and attributed entirely to Prime membership) will grow 10% a year for the next five years. That growth rate will scale down to the inflation rate (1.50%) in year 10, but that cumulated effect will result in incremental sales of $1,275/member in 2027. 
3. Operating Margins on revenues: To estimate the operating margin on revenues, I started with Amazon's operating margin but then added back the shipping, customer service and Prime media acquisition costs, since I treat them as separate costs. The resulting margin is 12.11%.
4. Shipping Costs: The biggest cost to Amazon is shipping and much of what the company seems to be doing both in terms of new investments (in distribution centers, trucks and drop off locations) and acquisitions (Whole Foods) seems to be designed to keep these costs in check. We will assume that shipping costs will grow 3% a year for the next five years (well below the incremental revenue growth), before settling into growing at the inflation rate thereafter. 
5. Customer Service Costs: The cost of Prime member customer service will increase 5% a year for the next 5 years and the inflation rate thereafter.
6. Risk and Cost of Capital: I will assume that Amazon’s overall cost of capital applies as the right risk adjusted rate to use on all of its member valuations, since they partake in its entire product line. That cost of capital, in October 2017, given a US treasury bond rate of 2.35% was 8.00%.

With those assumptions in place, we can estimate the value of a Prime member:

Download spreadsheet

With our estimates, the value per prime member is approximately $486 and the total value of 85 million prime members is $41.3 billion.  While you may view this value as built on a mountain of guesstimates, and you would be right, the analysis does provide guidance on the drivers of Prime member value. The two biggest are:

1. Growth in incremental revenues: Getting Amazon Prime members to buy more products and services is key to their value and it should be no surprise to see stories like this one. As revenue growth climbs from 10% to 15%, for instance, the value of an existing member becomes $744 and the value of member base increases almost 65%.
2. Keeping shipping costs contained: The key to extracting value from Prime members is checking shipping costs. To illustrate, if shipping costs grow at the same rate as incremental revenues do, the value per member collapses to $71.50. 

Viewing Prime members through this prism makes it easier to explain the Whole Foods acquisition, by Amazon, for about $14 billion. Rather than think of it as Amazon’s entrée into a low-margin, intensely competitive grocery business, it would make more sense to view it as an acquisition of a distribution system (of 460 Whole Foods stores, in prime locations) that will reduce shipping costs in the future, while also providing a new menu of products/services that can be offered to Prime members. That is bad news for a whole host of other players in the market but that is a story for another day.

The Value of a New Member

To get from the value of an existing member to that of a new member, you need to have a measure of how much Amazon is spending to acquire new members. As I noted earlier, the company is opaque on this issue, though I would hazard a guess that it is a much more onerous number outside the United States. If you work with my guess of $100/new member as the base year number, we need only one more estimate to get to the value of new members and that is the growth in the membership base. Given the success that the company has shown on this front in the last five years, we will assume a growth rate of 15% for the next five years (which will bring Prime membership to 155 million in 2022). Given that large base, we will scale growth down to 5% a year from years 6-10 and to 2.25% a year thereafter.

Download spreadsheet

Again, with our estimates, the value of new Prime Members is approximately $53.9 billion and that number, in addition to being sensitive to our estimates of growth in members, magnifies the effects of incremental revenue and shipping cost growth that affected the value of an existing member. Thus, setting shipping costs to grow at the same rate as incremental revenues makes the value of new members a negative number, suggesting that growth will become value destructive if shipping costs are not brought under control.

The Corporate Drag

While it is tempting to stop and add the value of existing members and new members to arrive at the value of Amazon Prime, you would be missing a significant cost that we will term the corporate drag. To feed its ambitions with Prime, Amazon is spending far more on media content (books, movies, TV shows) than it would otherwise have and those costs will continue to grow with Prime. Earlier, we assume that 10% of the company’s current technology/media costs are attributable to Prime, yielding a base year cost of $1,609 million. We will assume that these costs will grow with the number of Prime members, yielding the following value for future costs:

Download spreadsheet

In effect, we will lower the value of Amazon Prime by $32.8 billion to reflect these additional costs. Note that though I treat this cost as a drag, it is not wasted, since it is the additional media that is being offered as a sweetener for existing Prime members to stay on and new ones to join.

The Value of Amazon Prime

Now that we have valued Amazon Prime’s existing members, its new members and the corporate drag, it is a matter of bringing them all together into a consolidated value. In our judgment, Amazon Prime is worth $62.2 billion to Amazon:   

Category	Value/Cost today	Details
Value of Existing Members	$41,334.69	Value of 85 million members @$486/each
Value of New Members	$52,792.78	Value of new members added
- PV of Corporate Expenses	$32,845.63	Value of additional media/tecnology costs
Value of Prime Membership	$61,281.83	Overall value of Amazon Prime

I know that I have made a multitude of assumptions along the way to get to this value and that you may disagree with many of them. As always, you can download my spreadsheet and make the changes that you think need to be made. If you work at Amazon or view yourself as an expert on Amazon (I am not), your numbers should be much better than mine, and I would hope that your valuation will reflect the better information. While I have made a few optimistic assumptions to get to the value of Amazon Prime, I believe that there is an additional value that I have not counted in. Amazon is building a base of loyal, intense members that it can draw on to promote whatever its next product or service is, whether it be in retailing, technology, entertainment or cloud computing. That value is what you could call a real option, though those words are used far too frequently in places where they should not be, and that real option may be Amazon’s ultimate wild card.

Conclusion

I have long described Amazon as a Field of Dreams company, one that goes for higher revenues first and then thinks about ways of converting those revenues into profits; if you build it, they will come. In coining this description, I am not being derisive but arguing that the market's willingness to be patient with the company is largely a the result of the consistency with Jeff Bezos has told the same story for the company, since 1997, and acted in accordance with it. Amazon Prime symbolizes how Amazon plays the long game, an investment that has taken a decade to bear fruit, but one that will be the foundation on which Amazon launches into new businesses. I know that there are many companies that model themselves after Amazon, but unless these "Amazon Wannabes" can match its narrative consistency and long time horizon, it will remain a one of a kind.

YouTube Video


Attachments

1. Amazon Prime Valuation
2. Amazon 10K (2016)

Previous (related) blog posts

1. User/Subscriber Economics: The Value of an Uber User (June 2017)
2. User/Subscriber Economics: Value Dynamics (July 2017)